Dynamite Entertainment 2017
By Lights
Skin & Earth is a story of a girl looking for hope in a hopeless world. Caught between romance and cults, gods and mortals, and just trying to find a good borscht, Enaia Jin is lead down a dark path by new lovers that reveal a twisted fantasy world and her own true nature.
Alright so I have no real idea what it all means and guess what it’s a lot like real life. We have no real idea what we’re doing we are just trying to get by doing the best we can and hopefully find someone along the way to take the journey with us. En might be a dreamer and a tad naive but she’s got a good head on her shoulders and hopes & dreams that drive her forward and that is her strength and her achilles heel.
I actually like that there are a couple of ways to see what happens in this issue. That men are still kind of scum in a post apocalyptic society just means as a species we don’t change. Still seeing Priest and watching them have that conversation and seeing what he does afterward well left me conflicted. That says a lot about the level of writing and characterisation that we get here.
It isn’t often that you can see Priest was trying to do the right thing by En and just did it poorly. For En well she’s a girl who hasn’t learned to separate emotions from physical actions and we’ve all been there when first active. So the combination of the two viewpoints make it hard to hate either one of them but also make it hard to like them in this scenario. That the story is deeper than it appears and as thought provoking as it becomes is a pleasant surprise after all since Lights is a Canadian Singer & Songwriter i’ve never heard of.
Turns out she’s actually quite talented as the interiors here are nice done, a bit amateur but nonetheless nice to see. There’s a nice amount of emotion and a real sense of this world and what it has to offer by what we see here. The way the page layouts are used through angles and perspective help the flow of the story. The masks they wear are disturbing but meant to be and the way the entire panel is used, see backgrounds, is nicely done.
We’re supposed to like En because she’s a girl trying her best to find the hope in such a trying and hopeless world. She’s very much on a journey of self-discovery and will find herself in new situations and with new people that will continue to shape how she looks at life but I sincerely hope she never loses her sense of wonder and what if. It’s part of what makes her special and believable this sense that she’s meant for something bigger.
This is a touching look at life that could be happening at any point in time in the world as we know it. It does make me want to hear the forthcoming album this is based off of as well and as for that tie-in hopefully there will be some kind of pre-release look at a song or two from the album.